“Easy,” a voice said.
I was lowered onto the grass instead.
Dominic appeared above me, anxious and pale. He knelt beside me. “Can you hear me?”
“Unfortunately,” I croaked.
Someone nearby laughed in obvious relief.
Dominic began checking me with practiced efficiency, running his hands along my arms, my shoulders, asking questions I only half processed. “Anything broken?”
“Probably my dignity.”
“Besides that.”
I considered it. “My everything hurts.”
“That is not helpful.”
Someone pressed water into my hand. Someone else announced that I appeared mostly intact.
Mostly.The word felt encouraging.
A few yards away, the men gave Rhain a wider berth as he finally shifted back, exhausted and shaking. Several of them moved toward him immediately, checking him with the same urgency they had shown me.
For a moment I simply lay there in the grass, staring at the clouds drifting overhead.
I had fallen from the sky. Rhain had caught me. And somehow, against all reasonable expectations, neither of us was dead.
There was, I decided, a reason most women fantasized about werewolves. Nobody ever got dropped out of the sky by a werewolf.
On the Record
Catalina
Rhain and I walked into the chamber together.
The session had been called for eight. It started late, though not by much, because at five minutes to eight the courtyard everyone was meant to cross had stopped being a courtyard and become the place where a man took me into the air.
The minutes since had been spent getting the three of us off the grass and behind a table while staff saw to what was left on it.
Yuki had not moved the hour. She had no intention of letting attempted abduction interfere with the schedule.
By my read, Yuki had decided the fastest way to bury the United States’ allegation was to let the record show the council seating a freely bonded mate eight minutes after Martin Solberg had tried and failed to steal her off the lawn.
The room had been arranged for diplomacy. Which meant it had been arranged for witnesses.
Yuki sat at the head of the long table. The allied Romanian observer was at her right. Three senior Ashenmere elders sat to her left. Bjorn occupied the far end, in the chair reserved for the Norwegian delegation. The chair across from him had been left empty.
Rhain took the seat at my right. A bruise had begun to darken along his jaw, and he had declined, twice, to let anyone look at it before the session.
The seat at my left would be filled last.
Ambassador Harrow was already in the room when we came in.
She had not been able to make an entrance. She had arrived at thesouth gate at seven fifty-eight, two minutes early, in time to stand on the gravel beside her car and watch one Ashenmere enforcer in dragon form kill another over the meadow. She had watched him take back, by force, the American citizen the other had been carrying away.
She had seen all of it.
